The United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio has held his post for over a month in what has been a turbulent start under the Trump administration.

As global talks of tariffs, and conflict in Ukraine and Gaza continue, we examine Rubio’s hawkish foreign policy approach and his stance on Sri Lanka.

A Republican senator from Florida, Rubio has built his political career on a hardline stance against China, advocating for US military strength and economic protectionism. His foreign policy ideology has evolved over time, from neoconservative interventionism during his failed 2016 presidential bid, to pragmatic nationalism, where he claims American resources should be prioritized to defend its national interests rather than addressing every global crisis.

Rubio’s anti-China rhetoric has been a recurring theme in his political career, accusing Beijing of human rights violations against Uyghurs, crushing democracy in Hong Kong, and military aggression in Taiwan. His stance has earned him sanctions from China and praise from Republican hardliners.

Rubio on Sri Lanka: Religious Persecution and Debt-Trap Diplomacy

Despite Sri Lanka not being a primary focus of his foreign policy discourse, Rubio has previously commented on human rights violations, religious persecution, and Sri Lanka’s economic entanglement with China.

In 2013, during the confirmation hearing of Nisha Desai Biswal as the Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, Rubio highlighted attacks on churches in Sri Lanka, alongside cases of religious intolerance in India and Pakistan.

“30 churches have been attacked by Buddhist extremists – quite frankly I never knew such a thing existed, but apparently it does,” Rubio remarked, expressing concern over the increasing loss of religious liberties across South Asia.

At the time, attacks against Christian and Muslim communities were escalating in Sri Lanka, with extremist Buddhist organizations like Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) engaging in racist rhetoric and violence. Rubio’s comments stood out as one of the few instances where a US senator explicitly condemned Buddhist extremism in Sri Lanka.

He further called for the US government to reconsider foreign aid to countries where religious freedoms were under threat, positioning human rights as a key pillar of his foreign policy approach.

“In this part of the world, religious liberties are under incredible duress,” he said.

By 2019, Rubio had shifted focus to China’s global influence, particularly its debt-trap diplomacy, using Sri Lanka as a cautionary tale. He criticized China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), describing it as a predatory economic strategy designed to entrap countries in unsustainable debt.

“Some countries have already learned hard lessons from Beijing’s debt-trap diplomacy,” he wrote. “For example, Sri Lanka was forced to give a Chinese state-owned company majority control of its $1.3 billion Hambantota port for 99 years after it defaulted on a Chinese loan.”

Rubio’s remarks echoed Western concerns over China’s geopolitical expansion through its infrastructure financing, particularly in South Asia and Africa. His stance was aligned with the Trump administration’s push to counter China’s influence, particularly in locations such as Sri Lanka, where Beijing has secured control over major infrastructure projects.

Rubio’s current foreign policy vision 

As Secretary of State, Rubio continues to advocate for a tough stance on China, though he acknowledges that the US must engage with Beijing strategically. In a January 2025 interview, he stated:

“China is going to be a rich and powerful country.  We are going to have to deal with them.  In fact – and I said this in my call with their foreign minister, but I said this publicly – the future – the history of the 21st century will largely be about what happened between the US and China.  So for us to pretend that somehow we’re not going to engage with them is absurd.”

However, he remains committed to countering China’s influence, and prioritizing American interests in foreign engagements.

“What’s been horrifying is that for 25 or 30 years, we’ve treated China as a developing country, and we allowed them to continue to do things that were unfair. We said, go ahead, let them cheat on trade, let them steal our technology, because when they get rich they’ll become just like us. They became rich, they did not become like us.”

Rubio also acknowledged that the era of American ‘unipolar power’ may be over.

“It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power,” he said.

“That was not – that was an anomaly.  It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.  We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea, you have to deal with.”

“So now more than ever we need to remember that foreign policy should always be about furthering the national interest of the United States and doing so, to the extent possible, avoiding war and armed conflict, which we have seen two times in the last century be very costly.  They’re celebrating the 80th anniversary this year of the end of the Second World War.  That – I think if you look at the scale and scope of destruction and loss of life that occurred, it would be far worse if we had a global conflict now.  It may end life on the planet.  And it sounds like hyperbole, but that’s – you have multiple countries now who have the capability to end life on Earth.  And so we need to really work hard to avoid armed conflict as much as possible, but never at the expense of our national interest.  So that’s the tricky balance.”

Rubio’s political trajectory

“The first and most important pillar of my foreign policy will be a renewal of American strength. This is an idea based on a simple truth: the world is at its safest when America is at its strongest,” Rubio wrote in 2015 during his first presidential bid.

Now, as Secretary of State under US President Donald Trump, his focus on military strength and economic security aligns with his long-standing vision of American global dominance. But there has been a pragmatism to this approach.

Michael Hanna, US program director at the International Crisis Group, noted:

“He has a very traditional, hawkish view of America’s role in the world, but we’ve also seen ways in which he’s simply dispensed with long-held views since becoming Secretary of State.”

Rubio’s support for reducing international aid programs, for example—a stark shift from his earlier advocacy for US soft power—reflects his alignment with Trump’s ‘America First’ doctrine.

This balancing act between interventionism and Trump’s nationalist rhetoric is likely to define his tenure. While Sri Lanka may not be a central focus of his foreign policy, his anti-China sentiment and concern for religious freedoms suggest that Colombo’s ties with Beijing may remain an area of scrutiny under his leadership.

-TG